About ten years ago we were able to see a German documentaryon post-Shoah Czernowitz. Till then the city had been the site ofthe 1908 Yiddish Language Conference, but after watching thedocumentary, Czernowitz became a bastion of German language and culturethat had marked as well it's relatively large Jewish community.We had to wait several years to visit Czernowitz,till a flight from Kiev made the city easily accesible. We found an Ukranian city that was trying to preserve its sixcenturies of history and its Habsburgian days and we were able toretrace its Jewish past, that is slowly fading away. Back from our trip we were lucky to find Marianne Hisch and Leo Spizer's book "Ghosts of Home. The Afterlife of Czernowitz inJewish Memory". and through its pages we got acquainted with therecent and painful past of its Jewish community. The streets,houses, buildings, memorials that we had just seen, acquired anew life through the book's pages, that mark the days and years ofa family and its friends going trhough the hell of the "special"Romanian Holocaust. The authors' visits to the city helped us tosee Czernowitz in a different perspective, as "Ghosts of Home"is a book that brings back the reality of midcentury lifein one of the many corners of Europe that perished forever, andmore important, it gives us a glimpse of the strength and couragethat enabled some people to face a period that nobody could haveforeseen.